[opam-devel] [NEW] OCaml oasis and Janestreet Core and Async

[Christopher Zimmermann]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:09:49 -0700 Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>
wrote:
> 
> I'm happy to merge OpenBSD-specific fixes into OPAM -- it's possible
> to add OS-specific selectors in the patches field to not affect other
> OSes.

Can you show me an example please?

> However, it is very convenient to be able to depend on a binary
> installation of OCaml libraries for end-user applications,
> particularly given the strict versioning requirements.

If that's the only reason for maintaining OCaml ports, I'd rather 
remove all ports without any end-user reverse-depends. If we don't add 
oasis, this would be all devel/ocaml-* ports (for starters).
Our current set of OCaml end-user applications has a quite modest set 
of dependencies. Is this prone to change?

> The OpenBSD port is also higher quality when it comes to architecture
> portability, since it separates out bytecode vs native code vs native
> dynlinking architectures.

In general I'd rather improve the quality of upstream / the OPAM 
repository than just OpenBSD ports.

> There is enough metadata available in an OPAM package to generate a
> snapshot of OpenBSD ports from a given package set.  I'm not
> suggesting we automatically import the results into OpenBSD, but it
> would really help keep the ports tree in sync with the latest
> versions of libraries. The metadata needed for this is roughly:
> 
> - build instructions -- present in OPAM, but they do not separate out
>   fake installation and native code at the moment.  This could be
> added to OPAM fairly easily.
> 
> - external dependencies -- OPAM has a 'depexts' field where OS
> packages can be specified.  This is a free-form field, so it could be
> a precise pkgspec for the OpenBSD entry.
> 
> - categories and homepages -- these can be lifted straight out of the 
>   OPAM spec, and tags can be used to map OpenBSD-specific information.

Great! That's something I wanted for quite some time now, but I didn't 
know enough of OPAM to tell whether it was feasible. Are you thinking 
of translating the OPAM repository to a ports tree or let OPAM generate
binary packages?

> More broadly though, does any other language-specific packaging system
> do this at the moment, or all ports maintained manually? 
> 
> -anil

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